Ataktos – a dialogue on Stoic ethics, p. 1 Ataktos: a dialogue on Stoic ethics Dirk Baltzly © 1997 It’s one of those bits of historical bad luck that no complete work by any of the first three heads of the Stoic school of philosophy (Zeno of Citium, Cleanthes, and Chrysippus) survives. We have some fragments of their many books and reports of what the early Stoics thought and said, but these are all very hard to puzzle out. The Roman philosopher and rhetorician Cicero attempted to provide popularised Latin versions of the doctrines of Stoics and Epicureans in De Finibus (On Goals). His works are one of our many sources for what the Stoics thought and are reasonably readable. In what follows, I’ve tried to do the same thing. Cicero has representatives of the different Hellenistic philosophical schools explain their views about what happiness consists in, but he allots a whole chapter to each school. I try to bring the Epicureans, Aristotelian and Stoic views about happiness into sharper contrast in less space. For a general overview of Stoicism, see the Stanford On-line Dictionary of Philosophy (http://plato.stanford.edu). Scene: the painted porch (stoa poikilê) in Athens, 272 BC. Zeno of Citium, aged 62, is sitting in the shade of one of the columns writing on a wax tablet with his stylus. He is approached by Ataktos, an Athenian about your age. A: Good afternoon. You’re the esteemed Stoic philosopher Zeno, aren’t you? May I ask your advice? Z: (not looking up) It’s a public place. You can ask whatever you like. And I, for my part, don’t need to talk to perfect strangers in this very pleasant public place. A: But I have something that I would be willing to trade for some advice. Pederastes, who studies dialectic with Diodorus, is keen to impress me. He’s told me a new sophism that is making the rounds among the Megarians. I’ll share it with you if only you’ll give me some advice. Z: Ah, a new logical puzzle! You certainly know my tastes, boy. Let’s have it. If I’ve heard it already, I’ll give you advice. If I haven’t heard it, I’ll give you good advice. A: OK, here goes. If you never lost something, you have it still: but you never lose your horns. So, therefore, you have horns. Z: Oh splendid! It doesn’t seem to turn on the fact that a word names both a thing and itself, like this one: What you say comes out your mouth. You say a wagon, so a wagon comes out your mouth. It’s more like the question, ‘Have you stopped beating your wife yet?’ It presupposes that one of two things must be true when it might be the case that neither is. But, if this is so, what of the principle that one of two opposed propositions must be true. Hmmmm. Anyway, what does Pederastes say that Diodorus says about it? A: Zeno. I hate to be impertinent, but you did promise to give me some good advice in exchange for a sophism that you haven’t heard. Frankly, I don’t care whether I still have the horns I never lost. What’s sure is that I’m caught in the middle of what threatens to become a very ugly domestic dispute and I need some help now—before I go home. Tell me quick. What is happiness? What should I pursue and how shall I live? Z: Anything else boy? Allbloodymighty Zeus! A: I know it’s asking quite a lot, but here’s my situation. Grandfather studied philosophy with Aristotle at the Lyceum. He thinks it’s more than about time for me to start exercising my capacities for moral and intellectual reasoning. He’s always at me. ‘Ataktos, what have you done today that was courageous? Did you take the proper pleasure in it? Did it proceed from a stable state of your character? How can you expect to be happy if you don’t engage in the activities characteristic of virtuous people?’ It’s really getting on my nerves. I mean he is always the perfect gentleman—politically involved, using his money to Ataktos – a dialogue on Stoic ethics, p. 2 endow choruses and other public benefits. In addition, he is active in the mathematics study circle at the Lyceum and he and Theophilus are cataloguing the different kinds of fish caught near Lesbos. If he’s right about happiness, then I suppose I’d better get with the program, but I need to be sure that he is right. Otherwise I would be acquiring all these habits for nothing. But that isn’t the half of it. My father has been hanging out in Epicurus’ garden. He and my grandfather have been having arguments about the nature of pleasure that are getting downright unpleasant. My father says that in putting so much stress on the exercise of practical and theoretical virtue, Grandad is confusing the means with the end. He says we value courage and do courageous actions simply because the acquisition and exercise of the virtues are the best strategy for having a life filled with pleasure. Grandfather gets very cross—well, he says he isn’t very cross: he’s only cross to the right degree for the circumstances—anyway, he says that the capacity to feel pleasure is common to all the animals and thus it can’t be a fit goal for human beings. A truly fine speciman of humanity will feel pleasure in the course of exercising his practical and theoretical virtues, but he does not act for the sake of this pleasure. Rather, he chooses to do what is courageous because it is fine and good. He says that father doesn’t do anything for the right reasons. Further, he thinks that father isn’t sufficiently involved in the political and social life of Athens. He says father might as well be a pig wallowing in the mud of Epicurus’ garden. Z: Hmm. I can see that your family life is a bit difficult at the moment. The first thing that you must realise is that both of them are absolutely, positively, dead wrong. A: Oh, but wait Zeno. It gets even worse. Mother got fed up with their quarrelling and left the household. She’s taken up with the Cynics and won’t even come home. She wears her cloak doubled over so she can sleep rough in the streets and carries such food as she can beg from passers-by in a rucksack. Naturally, the family is absolutely mortified. Though she isn’t speaking to father, she keeps meeting me when I go to the gymnasium in the mornings and talking to me about what I must do with my life. She thinks I should be sleeping rough too! She says that money and influence are absolutely meaningless as far as happiness goes. She says that whoever is happy is utterly self-sufficient and that whether you continue to be rich isn’t always under your control. Thus, these things are no part of happiness and are not even properly called good things, but are utterly indifferent. I’ve tried to tell her that she needs to take better care of herself—that she’ll become ill playing at being homeless. She says that even health isn’t important for happiness. The Cynic philosophers tell her that only those who are virtuous are happy and that they are happy regardless of what befalls them. Father and grandfather don’t find that so bad. It is commendable to praise virtue. But mother and her Cynic friends think that a great deal of what people call virtuous or moral behavior is, in fact, not really so. She called it ‘indifferent’. It’s really quite shocking. She told me the other day that it was only a convention that incest was wrong and that, as things were by nature, there was nothing wrong with it. Or even cannibalism! Father says that he will have her brought back to the house by force. She is his wife and by the laws of Athens he commands her, but she just spits at him and says that she is a ‘citizen of the world’ (cosmopolitan) and that the only real marriage is between two people who both want to be with one another and only for as long as they want this. Oh she has thrown off convention! That’s for sure. One of the household slaves saw her the other day in the marketplace having a .... uh, well, you know ... ah, sort of amusing herself and all. In the marketplace! She told him that she was simply being self-sufficient and that it was a pity she couldn’t get rid of hunger simply by a similar rubbing of her stomach. 1 One understands now why they call the Cynics cynics.2 1 For details of the outrageous behavior of the Cynics, see Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, trans. R. D. Hicks (London, 1925), book 6. Hicks is a bit prudish in his translation. If you suspect something worse than what he says, you’re probably right. For serious scholarship on the Cynics, see F. Sayre, ‘Greek Cynicism’, Journal of the History of Ideas 6 (1945), 113–18. One might say that the Cynic were the hippies of antiquity. For an article that takes this idea seriously see, J. Xenakis, ‘Hippies and Cynics’, Philosophical Inquiry 16 (1973), 1–15.